Oh so broken
Feb. 24th, 2010 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
branchandrootSo, academic publishing in the humanities. melannen's post reminded me tangentially of everything that most pisses me off about it, and since I'm already grumpy over other things, I shall proceed to rant.
1) There's no money to the actual producers. Not a red cent. You're lucky if you get so much as a complimentary copy of the issue your article appears in. One thing you can be dead sure of is that you will never, ever receive cash compensation for any article, and damn few books. You don't get paid to do peer review, you're expected to put in hours of extra work for free all for the sake of having a "professional credit" to stuff into your CV (eg "I was stupid enough to love a field where half my labor is uncompensated"). Half the time even the journal editors don't get paid. Typesetting and so on is increasingly outsourced to underdeveloped areas where minimum wage is only a dream, which brings us to the next point.
2) The for-profit companies (Gale, Springer, etc.) who have been buying up the journals for decades are making money. They are making money by cutting production costs even further while increasing the subscription prices and selling individual articles for five to ten bucks apiece through online outlets like Amazon. See above re the author never seeing a cent of this. And even the university libraries are becoming unable to pay subscriptions.
3) The writers, as a matter of course, sign over every single right we have to the work. The publisher can re-publish or sell it anywhere they like, hell they could probably make it into a movie, but if I want to republish my own damn article in a new anthology I have to get Gale's permission. If I want to use my own article in my own class, I have to get Gale's permission and quite possibly pay a "nominal" license fee; you know, for that article I was never paid anything for.
When the publishers in question were purely academic concerns, subsidized by crumbs of their university's budget, all this free labor made more sense. It was for love and discovery and bragging rights; it had a whole lot in common with fandom, actually. But once the for-profit companies came into it the whole thing turned into bare-faced exploitation, and I swear half the academy can't even see it. Possibly because they don't listen to the librarians, who have seen the prices going up and the access going down first hand. Among the half who can see it, there is still a sad degree of resistance to moving over to open-access web-journals, and thereby back to our previous position of crumb-subsidized labor of love that, extra bonus, anyone who wanted could read, thus getting us and our work out from under the control of Gale et al.
It just frosts my cookies, you know?
melannen's post reminded me tangentially of everything that most pisses me off about it, and since I'm already grumpy over other things, I shall proceed to rant.1) There's no money to the actual producers. Not a red cent. You're lucky if you get so much as a complimentary copy of the issue your article appears in. One thing you can be dead sure of is that you will never, ever receive cash compensation for any article, and damn few books. You don't get paid to do peer review, you're expected to put in hours of extra work for free all for the sake of having a "professional credit" to stuff into your CV (eg "I was stupid enough to love a field where half my labor is uncompensated"). Half the time even the journal editors don't get paid. Typesetting and so on is increasingly outsourced to underdeveloped areas where minimum wage is only a dream, which brings us to the next point.
2) The for-profit companies (Gale, Springer, etc.) who have been buying up the journals for decades are making money. They are making money by cutting production costs even further while increasing the subscription prices and selling individual articles for five to ten bucks apiece through online outlets like Amazon. See above re the author never seeing a cent of this. And even the university libraries are becoming unable to pay subscriptions.
3) The writers, as a matter of course, sign over every single right we have to the work. The publisher can re-publish or sell it anywhere they like, hell they could probably make it into a movie, but if I want to republish my own damn article in a new anthology I have to get Gale's permission. If I want to use my own article in my own class, I have to get Gale's permission and quite possibly pay a "nominal" license fee; you know, for that article I was never paid anything for.
When the publishers in question were purely academic concerns, subsidized by crumbs of their university's budget, all this free labor made more sense. It was for love and discovery and bragging rights; it had a whole lot in common with fandom, actually. But once the for-profit companies came into it the whole thing turned into bare-faced exploitation, and I swear half the academy can't even see it. Possibly because they don't listen to the librarians, who have seen the prices going up and the access going down first hand. Among the half who can see it, there is still a sad degree of resistance to moving over to open-access web-journals, and thereby back to our previous position of crumb-subsidized labor of love that, extra bonus, anyone who wanted could read, thus getting us and our work out from under the control of Gale et al.
It just frosts my cookies, you know?
no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 10:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 05:19 pm (UTC)I suppose, in a way, I'm lucky. Popular culture and sf/f is still such a low-rent field I think more editors are willing to go ahead and try out this common, low-brow, populist thing called open access. *snorts*
no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 06:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 06:16 pm (UTC)It's a huge ball of yarn, all tangled up. And most senior faculty, who have actual influence in the system, don't see that there's anything wrong! It's going to have to be a word-of-mouth campaign to get people to accept the open access web journals as an acceptable publishing venue. Everything else will follow from that. And it's going to be a long damn haul, because there are too many idiots who faff on about how that would lower standards (and then can't actually say how it would do so when you pin them down about it).
no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 06:20 pm (UTC)>.< That is extremely frustrating.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 06:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-02-25 08:08 pm (UTC)...wait.
-_-;
no subject
Date: 2010-02-26 12:46 am (UTC)I'm being published in an upcoming academic book, and as I edit my contribution there are some things I want to add, but I'm severely limited by the fact that I no longer have access to a university library. I'm passionate about academics, and did consider going into it as a career at one point, but ended up deciding against it. It's frustrating that the world of academic writing (and research) is pretty much closed to me.
On a positive note, I really like the philosophy of people like "The Tolkien Professor," who does lots of free in-depth audio lectures because he hates the inaccesibility of academic literature. Add to that list MIT's open courseware and the new iTunes University. I hope that something like these free lectures and course material will soon start to pop up in the form of actual free access to academic papers, but I won't hold my breath.
no subject
Date: 2010-02-26 02:30 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 09:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-03-04 10:32 pm (UTC)